OLD TENET: A Manager's Beliefs and values are his or her
business.
NEW TENET: A manager's beliefs and values are everyone's
business.
A company's culture - its shared values and beliefs - develops
internally for the most part. X-engineering demands that the
company's beliefs and values be externalized. ... [N]o one is
suggesting that networked companies stand-ardize or homogenize
their cultural beliefs and values - such a move would hinder
innovation and produce a boring and static business world. But
ethics and behavioral standards must operate harmoniously across
the linked organizations in the same way that processes do.

Simply put, managers must be sure that their company's beliefs and
values will work well with those of their partners. ... Confronting
reality - a prerequisite for X-engineering - requires you to learn
all you can about any company and its managers that you are
considering as a partner. You must know what they really stand
for.

OLD TENET: Don't fix it if it ain't broke.
NEW TENET: Relish change.
"It is not the strongest of the species that survive," wrote
Charles Darwin, "nor the most intelligent, but the ones most
responsive to change."

Darwin's theory of survival applies to the world of business as
well as it does to the world of biology. Undoubtedly, a company's
capacity to respond quickly and adroitly to change will surely
determine its long-term success or failure; hence managers must
anticipate transitions, sometimes provoke them, and always embrace
them with open arms. ...

Yet most companies have not developed [an] appetite for
transformation. If everything is going well, managers are content
to maintain the status quo. ... Such an approach precludes
X-engineering.